It’s common wisdom that what you measure becomes important. That’s how we humans work. A clock makes you focus on time and so on. I consider myself a good driver having been driving 39 years without serious accidents and only a few speed tickets. When my kids practiced for driving license I heard about eco driving and thought that was a great initiative for the youngsters.

In November last year I signed up for the TeliaSense service which promised an easier car ownership through innovative services and features accessible from a nice app. I opted in to an annual inspection service from Bilprovningen, a maintenance service from Bilia and a road side assistance service from Viking which added good value to the car related services and Wi-Fi already in the app. Then in February I got a message that Eco Driving was added to the app and I immediately took a look more out of curiosity than to verify my superior driving skills. What! A big red and angry smiley starring at me! And in that moment I painfully recalled all the times my wife have told me that I’m driving aggressively.

From that day I have looked at the coloured smileys every single day. And guess what, it has changed my driving habits a lot.

I am amazed over my own behaviour! Yes I am a fighter and hate to lose but I would never have guessed that it would take me three months to become a better driver for my wife, my fellow drivers on the road and most importantly for the planet just because my driving was measured from an eco driving point of view and presented in my face.

I have also been presented statistics about what happens to people’s electricity consumption when their consumption is visualised to them and believe visualising individualised behaviour is a really good way to create value from IoT.

I’m working with Springworks who deliver this unique connected car service country by country together with mobile operators like Telia and it feels really good to see all work we do become something as meaningful as this!

Victoria and her team are true entrepreneurs! After many successful years, their current market weakened and through serious discussions with their customers they found the “next big thing” – printing active light. Sounds crazy but that’s what they do to respond to serious needs for people to be seen when falling into the ocean, running in the evenings, skiing, working in dangerous environments or simply to look fantastic. The material they have developed is connected to a battery and can be washed and applied on wearables, helmets and so on. When they won 2015 Outside Gear of the Show together with POC at Interbike 2015 in Las Vegas, their journey really took off.

Today Light Flex Technology are involved with a number of global brands who see great and innovative opportunities in their respective markets. The POC ski helmet is one of my favorites. Light Flex moved to THINGS from Barcelona about a year ago, have won a lot of awards and continue to excite people they get in front of like at the Grand opening of the Olympic Games in Brazil.

Sensus is an absolutely gorgeous electric guitar connected to the Internet, loaded with sensors and with features like any synthesiser. It’s developed by Mind Music Labs, a startup at THINGS in Stockholm founded by Michele Benincaso, an Italian “Maestro” from Cremona’s Antonio Stradivari Luthiery’ School. After having worked in the guitar world for more than ten years producing guitars for world-famous guitar players, Michele understood that while the world was changing at a fast pace and musicians’ needs were constantly evolving, guitars and most music instruments were stuck in the ’60s – with artists increasingly resorting to electronic equipment and computers to fill this gap. Michele and his dream-team of experts have developed Sensus and a couple of months ago they were ready to show the world. They did a YouTube video that immediately went viral and ever since they have been winning piles of awards. In June at Midem Cannes they were selected the most promising music startup of 2016 among more than 150 submissions representing 31 countries from around the world!

Sensus is a very inspiring example by itself but also underlines that it takes deep industry knowledge and a wide range of hardware, software and communication expertise to develop a great IoT solution. Avanti!

Like this:

Swedish real estate giant Riksbyggen develops and maintains buildings across the country since 75 years. Some 350.000 people live in buildings managed by Riksbyggen. Maintenance of buildings is expensive, dangerous and surrounded by a lot of regulations and policies. Just imagine climbing snow-covered rooftops in the cold and dark Swedish winter. Riksbyggen have an innovative and business focused CIO who started study the development of drones for building maintenance 2008 to try save money, time, lives and the planet. Early this year they tried the DJI Phantom med 4K-camera and the concept worked. An inspection takes some 10 minutes instead of two hours and the result is digitally documented in 4K, ready to show the customer and to be saved for planning of future maintenance etc. Just to check the snow indicators on the roofs takes a couple of minutes for a whole block instead of having to climb up on each roof to take a look. With an IR camera mounted on the drone additional checks can be done. Today Riksbyggen has 9 trained operators and are currently running a pilot with a couple of customers. Imagine how many similar applications there are for drones to revolutionise!

Less is more! A young team in Sweden, Shortcut Labs, are developing a small really useful generic BLE-connected button called flic which you can program to do almost anything with your smartphone. OK? Well, there are three ways to use it: click, double-click and keep pressed. And so what? It’s easily programmable. And what should I use it for? A remote trigger to take photos with your smartphone. Call home from your car with a single click on a button. Turn on Spotify and one of your three favorite playlists on your MC. Tell your family where you are walking if you don’t feel hundred percent safe. Start Siri. And so on.

One of the most talked about areas for Internet of Things is Smart Cities. Cities themselves invest to become one. Most of the large players in IoT focus on Smart Cities. There are events, predictions, articles and show cases everywhere and each and everyone use their own definition of Smart Cities. A city is a very complex and dynamic location which from an ICT point of view could be described as a system of systems. It is obvious that sub-systems could be more efficient using IoT solutions and that the overall system of systems could be improved if the data collected was shared cleverly between the systems. No wonder Smart Cities is a perfect topic to focus on both for suppliers and municipalities.

But how much smarter has cities become over the last years? Well, there are of course impressive reference cases here and there and a lot of sub-systems in a lot of cities have become better using IoT solutions. But the size and complexity of pulling it all together in a city is difficult to deal with both from practical and technical perspectives.

This is why I am really impressed by Infracontrol, their pragmatic approach to Smart Cities and what they have been able to do. They started about 20 years ago to help cities connecting mainly traffic related things like tunnel alarms, ventilation systems and traffic lights. As they grew bigger in several cities and with new applications they developed Infracontrol Online™ 2003 to connect cities and citizens for better services. Today they have 56 Swedish municipalities using Infracontrol Online™ and their first ones in Portugal in place as well. Their customers report 60% better service quality, 30% savings in maintenance expenses, a lot of energy savings and higher citizen satisfaction. Sounds smart to me! Needless to say Infracontrol is a member of the Swedish SMSE-alliance!

Better use of energy is one of the key challenges to our society today and smart metering is the first step towards a smarter electricity system. It makes it possible to understand the overall level of electricity consumption and for example compare it with historical data or similar buildings. But in order to understand which devices consumes what in a house, office or apartment we have had to put a meter on that specific device for a while and track the result.

But Watty, a small start-up in Stockholm, is taking a completely different and much more elegant and scalable approach – they listen to the electricity and identify patterns they recognize. In a similar way as Shazam identifies music they can see fridges, heat pumps and washing machines. Their detective mounted on the smart meter send the data to the cloud where Watty use their clever algorithms to analyze and report back in an easy to use app. They can even detect appliances that might go on fire or an open door to a fridge.

I think this is brilliant and the right approach to better energy use. Take a couple of minutes to listen to Eva Andersson at Watty presenting what they do in the Case Marathon at Internet of Everything For Real™ 2014 in Stockholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyfBrbh840o

Watty is of course a member of SMSE together with 27 other Swedish start-ups in the IoE space.